Sverker Sikström

• PhD
• Professor at Lund University

This study explores differences in how neurotypical individuals and users with ADD/ADHD anthropomorphize a chatbot, Alba, designed for mental health screening. While anthropomorphism is a heavily researched topic in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Human-Robot Interaction, the specific needs and perceptions of neurodivergent users remain undere...

The standard assessment of mental health typically involves clinical interviews conducted by highly trained clinicians. While effective in many cases, this approach faces significant challenges, including high costs, overburdened clinical workloads, variability in clinician expertise, and a lack of standardization. Recent progress in large language...

Recent years have seen a sharply rising interest on the scientific area dedicated to study of use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) research and applications (AI4CBT for brevity). Yet, little is known about how this interest is realized and hence the overall status, prospects, and possible challenges of AI4CBT a...

Mental health interventions are commonly evaluated using rating scales, though patients often prefer expressing their concerns in words. Advances in natural language processing (AI methods) now enable quantification of patients’ descriptions of mental health. This study explored whether responses to open-ended questions, analyzed with AI, provide a...

Background Words are a natural way to describe mental states in humans, while numerical values are a convenient and effective way to carry out quantitative psychological research. With the growing interest of researchers in gaming disorder, the number of screening tools is growing. However, they all require self-quantification of mental states. The...

The Ten Words Free Will Inventory (10WFWI) is an instrument for assessment of people’s notion and sense of free will. It was designed by D. Garcia (Rosenberg et al., 2015a) to ask individuals to generate descriptive words and narratives about free will and to evaluate their own sense of freedom of will. It contains four questions, two of them askin...

Background Gender discrimination of women is often emphasized in work contexts, whereas less focus is on how men are discriminated against in social relationships. Gender discrimination in decisions of family relations, is essential to study as the contact between parent and child is commonly viewed as the most important relationship in people’s li...

Rating scales are the dominating tool for the quantitative assessment of mental health. They are often believed to have a higher validity than language-based responses, which are the natural way of communicating mental states. Furthermore, it is unclear how difficulties articulating emotions—alexithymia—affect the accuracy of language-based communi...

Psychological constructs are commonly quantified with closed-ended rating scales. However, recent advancements in natural language processing (NLP) enable the quantification of open-ended language responses. Here we demonstrate that descriptive word responses analyzed using NLP show higher accuracy in categorizing emotional states compared to tradi...

BACKGROUND Intimate partner violence is a serious public health concern worldwide. According to WHO (2012), behavior in intimate relationships that causes psychological, physical, or sexual harm to the participant is defined as ‘intimate partner violence’ (IPV) OBJECTIVE To interpret and evaluate the narratives of victims of violence in intimate r...

In two studies, we examined if correct and incorrect statements in eyewitness testimony differed in semantic content. Testimony statements were obtained from participants who watched staged crime films and were interviewed as eyewitnesses. We analyzed the latent semantic representations of these statements using LSA and BERT. Study 1 showed that th...

RATIONALE: Recruiters need to make an unbiased assessment of applicants’ personality and work skills based on a personal letter and the occasionally attached picture. We use AI-methods in an experimental design (attractiveness/gender) to investigate if recruiters’ freely generated descriptions of fictive applicants’ personality predict ratings of...

RATIONALE: Personality, the major single determinant of people’s overall health, comprises temperament (automatic emotional reactions), character (goals and values), and identity (sense of self and who we are). These dimensions are often approached separately and have their basis in memory and learning systems that are dissociable developmentally a...

This study aimed to measure validity and reliability of the Persian version of the Cyber-Bullying/Victimization Experience Questionnaire (CBVEQ) among Iranian adolescents. This cross-sectional validation study was conducted on Iranian adolescents between January 2022 and September 2022. Online questionnaires were completed by a total of 1439 Irania...

BACKGROUND Words are a natural way to describe mental states in humans, while numerical values are a convenient and effective way to carry out quantitative psychological research. With the growing interest of researchers in gaming disorder, the number of screening tools is growing. However, they all require self-quantification of mental states. The...

BACKGROUND: Happiness is often conceptualized as subjective well-being, which comprises people’s evaluations of emotional experiences (i.e., the affective dimension: positive and negative feelings and emotions) and judgements of a self-imposed ideal (i.e., the cognitive dimension: life satisfaction). Recent research has established these two dimens...

Objective: The coronavirus pandemic has presented a significant challenge and brought about dramatic changes for universities and their students. This study aimed to evaluate machine learning algorithms for estimating COVID-19 stress levels among Iranian university students. Methods: We conducted an online survey from May 10th to November 20th, 202...

Background: Rating scales are the dominating tool for the quantitative assessment of mental health. They are believed to have a higher validity than language-based responses, which are the natural way of communicating mental states. Furthermore, it is unclear how difficulties articulating emotions affect the accuracy of language-based communication...

The aim of this study was to assess the psychometric properties of the Persian version of the Escapism Scale among Iranian adolescents aged 14–18. Between January 2021 and August 2021, cross-sectional study was conducted using a convenience sampling method to select 566 participants (340 girls and 226 boys) to investigate the relationship between p...

How wealth accumulates following investments is a fundamental process in our society, as is people’s understanding and acceptance of such processes. We show a fairness paradox, where people view an underlying wealth accumulation process as fair, but the outcome from it as completely unfair. This suggests that people misjudge how wealth accumulation...

Psychological constructs are commonly quantified with closed-ended rating scales, however, recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) allow for quantification of open-ended language responses with unprecedented accuracy. We demonstrate that specific open-ended question analyzed by natural language processing (NLP) shows higher accuracy in c...

Middle aged adults experience depression and anxiety differently than younger adults. Age may affect life circumstances, depending on accessibility of social connections, jobs, physical health, etc, as these factors influence the prevalence and symptomatology. Depression and anxiety are typically measured using rating scales; however, recent resear...

Background: Affectivity has been suggested as a complex adaptive meta-system composed of positive affect and negative affect, two independent but interrelated markers of well-being, that can be represented as four distinct affective profiles: self-fulfilling (high positive affect/low negative affect), high affective (high positive affect/high negat...

Previous research of gender differences in power has largely focused on the public domain (e.g., leadership positions), and to a lesser extent power on the private domain (e.g., power in private relationships), where people may perceive these domains to be more or less important in their lives. We studied gender differences in preference weighted p...

Accurate communication of the severity of violence in intimate relations is essential for the appropriate evaluation of offenders and victims in contexts such as court trials, custody cases, and the continuation of relationships. Using a new paradigm, this study quantifies discrepancies in how the severity of violence is communicated in texts writt...

Background: Choice theory stems from psychological concepts like self-concept, successful identity, and quality of the world. The theory encourages adolescents to accept the responsibility for their choices on the one hand and predict the effect of such decisions on their lives on the other hand. The present study aimed to investigate the effective...

Background Closed-ended rating scales are the most used response format for researchers and clinicians to quantify mental states, whereas in natural contexts people communicate with natural language. The reason for using such scales is that they are typically argued to be more precise in measuring mental constructs; however, the respondents’ views...

As the impact of AI on various scientific fields is increasing, it is crucial to embrace interdisciplinary knowledge to understand the impact of technology on society. The goal is to foster a research environment beyond disciplines that values diversity and creates, critiques and develops new conceptual and theoretical frameworks. Even though resea...

Previous research has shown that language in job adverts implicitly communicates gender stereotypes, which, in turn, influence employees’ perceived fit with the job. In this way, language both reflects and maintains a gender segregated job market. The aim of this study was to test whether, and how, language in organizational descriptions reflects g...

Psychological constructs are commonly quantified with closed-ended rating scales, however, recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) have been shown to allow for the quantification of open-ended language responses with unprecedented accuracy. Here, we showed that emotional events analysed by NLP show higher accuracy in categorizing emoti...

Older adults experience depression and anxiety differently than younger adults. Age may affect circumstances, depending on accessibility of social connections, jobs, physical health, etc, as these factors influence the prevalence and symptomatology. Depression and anxiety are typically measured using rating scales, however, recent research suggests...

BACKGROUND To accurately communicate the severity of self-experienced violence to a person not present at the event is crucial for proper treatment of the victim and a reasonable penalty of the perpetrator. Recent data shows that humans have biases in this communication, where the severity of psychological violence is underestimated and physical vi...

Background To support a victim of violence and establish the correct penalty for the perpetrator, it is crucial to correctly evaluate and communicate the severity of the violence. Recent data have shown these communications to be biased. However, computational language models provide opportunities for automated evaluation of the severity to mitigat...

Background Closed-ended rating scales are the most used response format for researchers and clinicians to quantify mental states, whereas in natural contexts people communicate with natural language. The reason for using such scales is that they are typically argued to be more precise in measuring mental constructs, whereas the respondents’ views a...

We show that using a recent break-through in artificial intelligence –transformers–, psychological assessments from text-responses can approach theoretical upper limits in accuracy, converging with standard psychological rating scales. Text-responses use people's primary form of communication –natural language– and have been suggested as a more eco...

Addictive disorders are characterized by cognitive, behavioral, and neurological impairments caused by dysregulations of brain structure that can extend well beyond early withdrawal in the months and years of recovery. The present study aimed to examine the efficacy of neurofeedback rehabilitation on anxiety in methamphetamine abusers. The sample c...

We show that using a recent break-through in artificial intelligence –transformers–, psychological assessments from text-responses can approach theoretical upper limits in accuracy, converging with standard psychological rating scales. Text-responses use people's primary form of communication –natural language– and have been suggested as a more eco...

The correct communication of the severity of violence is essential in the context of legal trials, custody cases, support of victims, etc., for providing fair treatment. A narrator that communicates their experiences of interpersonal violence may rate the seriousness of the incident differently than a rater reading the narrator’s text, suggesting t...

Objectives Previous research suggests that governments usually gain support during crises such as the Covid-19. However, these findings are based on rating scales that only allow us to measure the strength of this support. This article proposes a new measure of how voters evaluate Prime Ministers (PM) by asking for descriptive keywords that are ana...

Background Question-based computational language assessments (QCLA) of mental health, based on self-reported and freely generated word responses and analyzed with artificial intelligence, is a potential complement to rating scales for identifying mental health issues. This study aimed to examine to what extent this method captures items related to...

We propose that leaders play a more important role in voters’ party sympathy in proportional representation systems (PR) than previous research has suggested. Voters, from the 2018 Swedish General Election, were in an experiment asked to describe leaders and parties with three indicative keywords. Statistical models were conducted on these text dat...

Different types of well-being are likely to be associated with different kinds of behaviors. The first objective of this study was, from a subjective well-being perspective, to examine whether harmony in life and satisfaction with life are related differently to cooperative behaviors depending on individuals’ social value orientation. The second ob...

Power can be applied in different domains (e.g., politics, work, romantic relationships, family etc.), however, we do not always reflect on which domains we have power in and how important power in these domains is. A dominant idea is that men have more power than women. This notion may be biased because the concept of power is associated with publ...

Human beings are definitely storytellers capable of travel back and forward in time. We not only construct stories about ourselves, but also share these with others (McAdams and McLean 2013). We construct and internalize an evolving and integrative story for life, that is, a narrative identity (Singer 2004). However, the life story is just one of t...

Happiness or subjective well-being is often measured by assessing individuals’ judgments of life satisfaction and experience of positive and negative affect (Diener, 1984). In addition, recent research suggests that individuals’ sense of harmony in life is also an important component of subjective well-being (Kjell et al., 2016; Nima et al., 2020ab...

Peoples’ tendencies to be manipulative, opportunistic, selfish, callous, amoral, and self-centered (i.e., an outlook of separateness; Cloninger, 2004, 2007, 2013) are reflected in individual differences in three dark traits: Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy (Paulhus and Williams, 2002). At a general level, individuals who express any o...

Certain mental processes are suggested to exist beyond conscious awareness and control. These processes have often been categorized as implicit, in contrast to explicit, processes, which are readily available to conscious report. Researchers have attempted to measure and assess these implicit processes in a different number of ways. Projective meas...

Human beings create meaning from the fact that concepts tend to occur together in a predictable way. When we see a dog, we also see a tail, paws, eyes, legs, fur, and etcetera. In this context, we would see an owner who goes for a walk in the park with the dog that is attached to a leach, and the dog might bark. Thus, the concept of a dog is connec...

This chapter describes how semantic representations based on Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA; Landauer and Dumais 1997) may be used to measure the semantic similarity between two words, sets of words or texts. Whereas Nielsen and Hansen describe how to create semantic representations in Chap. 1; this chapter focuses on describing how these may be use...

This chapter focuses on using the semantic representations, consisting of a number of semantic dimensions, in multiple linear regressions to predict a numerical outcome variable. We examine whether there is a statistically significant relationship between texts and numerical values. Hence, we ask the question to what extent it is possible to predic...

This book discusses the application of various statistical methods to texts, rather than numbers, in various fields in behavioral science. It proposes an approach where quantitative methods are applied to data whereas previously such data were analyzed only by qualitative research methods. To emphasize the quantitative aspects of semantics, and the...

The aim of the study was to analyze freely generated self-presentations through the natural language processing technique of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA). Four hundred fifty-one participants (F = 360; M = 143) recruited from LinkedIn (a professional social network) were randomly assigned to generate 10 words to describe themselves to either an em...

Background: Subjective Well-Being (SWB) is usually conceptualized in terms of an affective (i.e., judgements of biological emotional reactions and experiences) and a cognitive component (i.e., judgements of life satisfaction in relation to a psychological self-imposed ideal). Recently, researchers have suggested that judgements of harmony in life c...

Semantic analyses are potentially important, but underutilized, tools to study social psychology. This chapter focuses on how semantic analysis, using personal pronouns, can be used to study important phenomena in social psychology. Personal pronouns can be used as proxies for social categories, and the semantic contexts associated to these pronoun...

The overall aim of this chapter is to present a guide in how to efficiently measure and statistically analyze text and numerical data using the online software SemanticExcel.com; we will focus on the following main functions:

In this chapter we will describe applications of latent semantic analysis to assess semantic linguistic maturity in children and how well the method can predict whether a child has developmental language disorder (DLD), based on orally produced narratives. Assessment of narrative ability in preschool years captures important cognitive, linguistic a...

We conducted factor analyses to validate the biopsychosocial model of subjective well-being and a general factor (SWBS). The general factor explained about 64% of the total variance in the model, while specific SWBS components together explained 15% of the total variance. Our study suggests SWB as a general factor in a multidimensional biopsychosoc...

Leadership development programs focus on the understanding of own emotions, cognitions, and, actions; as well as social skills. We found, using Artificial Intelligence (AI), that participants’ self-descriptions differed in meaning before and after the five-day Understanding Groups and Leaders (UGL) program. Thus, suggesting a significant change in...

This study examined the prevalence of resilient personality profiles among Swedish newly graduated nurses. Approximately 26% of the Swedish general population has a resilient personality profile: low Harm Avoidance (i.e. relaxed, confident, and optimistic), high Persistence (i.e. industrious, perseverant, and hard-working), and high Self-Directedne...

In Study 1, 34% of Swedish long-term unemployed self-reported health levels in the lowest 15% of the normal population. In Study 2, compared to the normal population, Swedish long-term unemployed scored lower/higher in well-being/ill-being (e.g., 60% had anxiety scores above levels that might need psychiatric care).

We used Item Response Theory in order to investigate the psychometric properties of three Subjective Well-being scales. There was less reliability for respondents with extreme latent scores of subjective well-being. Thus, to improve reliability we point out specific items that need to be modified or added.

The results provide an indication of important learning work climate factors associated to newly graduated nurses’ health, ability to cope successfully in adverse circumstances (i.e., resilience), and burnout symptoms. It is, however, plausible that there is an interconnection between personal vulnerability, learning climate, and health (Stoyanov &...

We used modern computational methods in order to show that written descriptions of daily life differ in malevolent content when people are asked to use it as a status update on Facebook (i.e., Facebook condition) compared to when they are asked to keep it for themselves (i.e., Confidential condition).

We quantified individuals’ self-descriptive words (i.e., identity) in order to validate two short personality inventories (i.e., Quantitative Semantics Test Theory, QuSTT). Despite being short, both inventories captured individuals’ identity as expected. Nevertheless, our method also pointed out some shortcomings and overlaps between the personalit...

Personal vulnerability (i.e. specific personality profiles) is a major factor for burnout among helping professionals. This study examined the prevalence of personality profiles among Swedish newly graduated nurses. Compared to the general population, 80% of the Swedish newly graduated nurses reported high Reward Dependence (i.e. being sentimental,...

Using AI and clustering methods, we found that self-descriptions of students applying to entrepreneurial schools differed in meaning (i.e., semantics) and the words being used (e.g., funny, friendly, creative, smart, kind, determined, and curious) compared to self-descriptions of a large population of US-residents. Thus, suggesting a specific aspir...

BACKGROUND: If individual differences are relevant and prominent features of personality, then they are expected to be encoded in natural language, thus manifesting themselves in single words. Recently, the quantification of text data using advanced natural language processing techniques offers innovative opportunities to map people’s own words and...

Background: Subjective well-being refers to the extent to which a person believes or feels that her life is going well. It is considered as one of the best available proxies for a broader, more canonical form of well-being. For over 30 years, one important distinction in the conceptualization of subjective well-being is the contrast between more af...

When interpreting a natural language argument that generalizes over a contextually relevant category, audiences are likely to activate the category prototype and transfer its characteristics onto category instances. A generalized argument can thus appear more (respectively less) persuasive than one mentioning a specific category instance, provided...

Background: Long-term unemployment is associated with psychiatric problems, higher risk of suicide, low levels of well-being, and high levels of burnout. In this context, among other factors such as sociodemographic status and IQ, specific personality traits are important for individuals’ chances to finding a job, getting hired, and retaining that...

Gender differences have been found in several aspects of autobiographical memory (i.e. personally experienced events). For example, previous studies have shown that females’ autobiographical memories contain more communal and emotional expressions than do males. However, an important question concerns whether these differences can be observed both...

Computer based analyses offer a possibility for objective methods to assess semantic-linguistic quality of narratives at the text level. The aim of the present study is to investigate whether a semantic language impairment index (SELIMI) based on latent semantic analysis (LSA) can discriminate between children with developmental language disorder (...

Purpose A wide range of variables, including cognitive, emotional and relational factors, could affect the level of peacefulness. The purpose of this paper is to examine key variables (theory of mind (ToM) and harmony) that mediate the personality trait of peacefulness. Design/methodology/approach The participants were 182 university students re...

Background: Creativity can be defined as the creation of something that is novel, useful, and valuable for society (i.e., high-level creativity) and/or everyday life. In this context, people have implicit theories of creativity as being either non-malleable (i.e., a fixed creative mindset) or malleable (i.e., a growth creative mindset). Our aim was...

We analyzed, using quantitative semantics, freely generated self-presentations by LinkedIn users randomly assigned to a recruitment or a friendship situation. Our findings account for how different situations elicit self-enhancement and self-protection through: (1) an agentic and positively valenced self-presentation (recruitment condition) or (2)...

We used quantitative semantics to find clusters of words in LinkedIn users’ self-descriptions. Some of these identity clusters discriminated between LinkedIn users with high/low positive affect (social and messy vs. honest), high/low negative affect (social vs. flexible), high/low locomotion (social vs. flexible), and high/low assessment (analytica...

The Ten Words Personality Inventory (10WPI) is an instrument for personality assessment that was designed by D. Garcia (Garcia, Rosenberg & Sikström, 2015) to ask participants to freely generate self-descriptive words and narratives. It contains one question asking participants to describe their personality using 10 words and one question asking to...

Four studies developed and validated two dictionaries to capture agentic and communal expressions in natural language. Their development followed the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) approach (Study 1) and we tested their validity with frequency‐based analyses and semantic similarity measures. The newly developed Agency and Communion dictio...

Semantic Excel (www.semanticexcel.com) is an online software application with a simple, yet powerful interface enabling users to perform statistical analyses on texts. The purpose of this software is to facilitate statistical testing based on words, rather than numbers. The software comes with semantic representations, or an ordered set of numbers...

Background: Research suggests that humans have the tendency to increase the valence of events when these are imagined to happen in the future, but to decrease the valence when the same events are imagined to happen in the past. This line of research, however, has mostly been conducted by asking participants to value imagined, yet probable, events....

Psychological constructs, such as emotions, thoughts, and attitudes are often measured by asking individuals to reply to questions using closed-ended numerical rating scales. However, when asking people about their state of mind in a natural context (“How are you?”), we receive open-ended answers using words (“Fine and happy!”) and not closed-ended...

We used natural language processing to test an improved priming paradigm (fixed vs. growth creative mindset) and to analyze personality’s relationship to person-centered care utterances among individuals who were randomly assigned to each condition. Condition predicted the freely generated words within the paradigm and Reward Dependence the person-...

The study shows how Latent Semantic Analysis can be used to predict differences in latent features of Facebook status updates vs. private posts. We found that Facebook updates are higher on the Dark Triad personality traits, but also reflect more positive valence, dominance and higher arousal, compared to private posts.

We used language processing analyses to cluster 8,443 taboo words that 900 participants generated when asked to list the 10 taboo words they used the most. A total of 1,062 words recurred more than once. Out of six clusters, five (Bigotry, Body, Family & Emotions, Condescending, Morality) showed gender differences.

We used quantitative semantics to find clusters of words in LinkedIn users’ self-descriptions to an employer or a friend. Some of these identity clusters discriminated between worker and friend conditions (e.g., flexible vs caring) and between LinkedIn users with high and low education (e.g., analytical vs. messy).

Frontal cortex activity is reduced in the left hemisphere during depression. Transcranial direct current stimulation is a non-invasive neuromodulation technique that can increase frontal cortex activity. Therapy based on transcranial Direct Current Stimulation and positive psychology therapy was applied for improving patients' quality of life. The...

Psychological constructs, such as emotions, thoughts and attitudes are often measured by asking individuals to reply to questions using closed-ended numerical rating scales. However, when asking people about their state of mind in a natural context (“How are you?”), we receive open-ended answers using words (“fine and happy!”) and not closed-ended...

We present the generalized signal detection theory (GSDT), where familiarity is described by a sparse binomial distribution of binary node activity rather than by normal distribution of familiarity. Items are presented in a distributed representation, where each node receives either noise only, or signal and noise. An old response (i.e., a “yes” re...

We used quantitative semantics to find clusters of words in LinkedIn users' self-descriptions to an employer or a friend. Some of these clusters discriminated between worker and friend conditions (e.g., flexible vs caring) and between LinkedIn users with high and low education (e.g., analytical vs. messy).

Much of identity formation processes nowadays takes place online, indicating that intergroup differentiation may be found in online communities. This paper focuses on identity formation processes in an open online xenophobic, anti-immigrant, discussion forum. Open discussion forums provide an excellent opportunity to investigate open interactions t...

Background: As humans we use language to introduce ourselves to other people and provide them with specific information that we want them to use to build their impression of us upon. The situation, however, influences individuals to focus on specific self-schemata when presenting themselves. Up until recently, however, most research has been conduc...

Background: Peoples’ tendencies to be manipulative, opportunistic, selfish, and callous are reflected in three dark character traits: Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy. Since individual differences are encoded in natural language, we expected that the words that people use to describe themselves reflected their malevolent traits. Metho...

Frontal cortex activity in the left hemisphere during depression is reduced. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a non-invasive neuromodulation technique that can increase frontal cortex activity. Therapy based on tDCS and positive psychology (PP) therapy was applied improving patients’ quality of life. The present study compared thre...